A post on the Bohemia Interactive Forums asks for help with a problem causing a watery image degradation in Take On Helicopters, Bohemia's new flight simulator. As it turns out this can be the result of using a pirated edition of the game, as Bohemia explains this comes from their "unique anti-piracy countermeasures," also noting a demo for the game is in the works. Here's word:

Bohemia Interactive deploys various antipiracy countermeasures in its titles and Take On Helicopters is no exception, some users have reported morphed/watery image degradation (see http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=126991 ). The original version of Take On Helicopters does not suffer from this degradation of visual quality. Piracy is a big problem for Bohemia Interactive, as an independent PC developer, and we're trying to focus our support as much as possible towards users of legitimate copies. Counterfeit copies of our games may degrade and, moral aspects aside, we certainly recommend only playing the original version. We have a free public demo version of Take On Helicopters in the development pipeline for those that prefer to test it before buying.

Quboid wrote on Nov 9, 2011, 13:56:Pirates are going to think your game is buggy and neither buy any of your stuff nor recommend it.

Lol, that's funny! They didn't buy the game in the first place and you think they would buy it eventually after stealing it? That's a riot! No loss for the developer there at all, lol. Good riddance to the thief and all their 'friends'.

Plus, who in their right mind would ever accept a recommendation from a pirate? Oh yeah, lets listen to the very people who steal and help spread trojans, viruses, and malware for our PC game recommendations. That's laugh #2!

This DRM actually seems pretty effective and user friendly (for -legal- users). They get to find out who is stealing their software, the software stops working when the developer decides, and it alerts others. That's very good compared to restrictive use problems for legal users with some DRM systems. Nice! Others should start using this kind of thing more and move away from some of the restrictive DRM methods that hurt legitimate users.

There's not a black and white distinction between those who buy games and those who pirate them. I have downloaded games in the past and then bought the legit copy, or bought a sequel (which was my original point). I played Quake to death without buying it without it ever really occurring to me that I was doing anything wrong. The little money I could got from delivering newspapers (up hill in the snow both ways) was being spent on hardware. I have since bought Quake, and all other Id Software games. If Quake had failed because of some apparent bug, I'd have gone back to Duke Nukem 3D.

Who takes recommendations from a pirate? All of us. Someone recommends a game, do you demand to see a receipt? How many of the comments and recommendations for on this fair site come from people who have a legal copy? All? I very, very much doubt it. Most, I hope, but not all. If someone reports that "Medal of Duty: Modern Battlefields 4" is a buggy piece of crap, do you stop to think that maybe it's a FADE type DRM and they have a pirate copy? I don't, I think that MoD:MB4 is a buggy piece of crap and I'd bet good money that 95% of other people do to.

I bought Op-FP and the ArmA games and every time I came across a bug, which was frequently, I was wondering if this was FADE kicking in incorrectly. Even if it wasn't, in all probability the case, the developers' time spent fixing bugs rather than implementing them might have solved the whole problem.

Pirates aren't a subspecies living in dark room and shuffling around the darkest recesses of the internet. They are ALL AROUND US!!